Questions and explanations in the classroom: Examining variation in early childhood teachers’ responses to children's scientific questions

Abstract

In the current study, we provide a systematic understanding of how early childhood educators (N = 209) believe that they would respond to children's scientific questions. We compared 105 inservice preschool and early elementary grade teachers’ and 104 preservice teachers’ responses on an online survey consisting of 3 parts: (a) responses to children's scientific questions (b) personal epistemologies and (c) demographic information. Results are consistent with naturalistic classroom data demonstrating that inservice and preservice teachers are more likely to answer children's questions with explanations rather than other types of responses when responding to children's science questions. We also explored possible relations between teachers’ responses, demographic variables, and personal epistemologies. We discuss implications of these findings for how teachers’ responses to children's questions may send a message to children about how to construct and reason about knowledge in the world.